Muriel awoke in their apartments at the Chatham the next morning to find herself decidedly out of sorts. Well as she had borne the voyage, she no sooner put her feet from her one of the two little canopied beds to the floor than she felt again the motion of the ship, and there was a return of the nausea that she attributed to the trouble which silently weighed upon her. She crawled back to the bed.

"I can't get up," she said.

Stainton was worried. He fluttered about her. He wanted to ring for servants to bring half-a-dozen things that Muriel would not accept. He wanted the smallest details of her symptoms. He wanted to send for a doctor.

"Go away," Muriel pleaded. "Please go away."

"But, dearie——"

"I wish I were back in New York."

Stainton, though he now feared the sea, was ready to undertake the return trip on the morrow.

"No, no," moaned Muriel. "Of course, now we are here, we must see things. But I won't have a doctor, Jim. Can't you see how it is with me? I shall be all right in an hour."

"All right, dearie; all right. I shall sit here by you."

"Please don't. I'm horrid when I'm sick."

"Not to me," said Jim.

"But I am. I look so horrid."

"I don't see it."

"Oh, you're good, Jim. But I want to be alone, just as you did when you were seasick. Go into the sitting-room. Please. I'll call you if I need you."

He went into their sitting-room, a room that shone with green and gilt, and looked out, across a narrow street, at the grey houses of uniform height and listened to the shrill street-sounds of Paris. He was lonely.

Somebody knocked at the door opening on the hall.

"Come in," he called. "I mean: entrez!"

A servant advanced, bearing a tray.

Jim saw that there was a card on the tray. He took it up and read the name of Paul Achille Boussingault. He did not remember ever having heard the name.

"Pour moi?" asked Jim.

"Yes, sir," said the servant, in a wholly unaccented English.

"Hum," said Jim. "Now I wonder what he wants. Very well, show him up."

He hurried to the bedroom.

"Dear," he enquired, "tell me quick: how do you pronounce B-o-u-double s-i-n-g-a-u-l-t?"

Muriel did not lift the covers that concealed her face.

"Go away," she said.

"I am going, only, dearie——"

"Go away—please!"

Jim re-entered the sitting-room. Was it Bou-sing-go? He had his doubts about that French in. If he remembered rightly, it was a kind of an, and the n ended somewhere in the nose. And who was M. Boussingault, anyhow?

"M. le docteur Boo-sÀn-go," announced the servant.

"Wait. How was that?" asked Jim, and then found himself face to face with his visitor.

His visitor was a stocky man, of not more than five feet five or six inches in height, inclined to pugginess. He had a leathery complexion, and the point of his thin Van Dyck beard was in a straight line from the sharper point in which his close-clipped bristling hair ended above his nose. It was black hair, and it retreated precipitately on both sides. He looked at Jim through eyeglasses bearing a gold chain and bound together by a straight bar, which gave the effect of a continuous scowl to his heavy brows. He bowed deeply.

"M. James Stainton?" he enquired.

"Yes," said Jim. "Good-morning."

"Good-morning, monsieur. I have the honour to present the compliments of my brother, M. Henri DuperrÉ Boussingault, and to ask that you will be so very good as me to command in the case I can be of any the slightest service to you and madame during your visit to Paris."

Stainton was at a loss.

"Your brother?" said he.

"M. Henri Boussingault," repeated the visitor. "He has to me written from Lyon to attend well to the appearance of your name among the distinguished arrivals in the Daily Mail."

The mention of Lyons aided Stainton's memory. He recalled now that the name of Henri Boussingault had appeared among those of the Lyonnaise syndicate that was interested in the purchase of the mine.

"Oh, yes," he said, and his broad teeth showed in a smile. "To be sure. This is very kind of you. Won't you sit down?"

Paul Achille Boussingault arranged his coat-tails and sat down with a grunt that apparently always accompanied this action on his part. His knees were far apart, and his feet scarcely touched the parquet floor. He was dressed completely in black, with the ribbon of an order fastened in the lapel of his frock-coat. His collar was low and round and upright, its junction with the shirt concealed by a small, prim black tie.

Stainton took a chair opposite him.

"Won't you have a cigar?" he asked.

"But thanks," said the visitor. "A cigarette only, if you do not object?" He produced a yellow packet of Marylands, and offered it to Jim.

"Thank you," said Stainton, lighting the cigarette. He did not like it, because, being an American, he did not care for American tobacco; but he tried to appear to like it. He wondered what he should talk about. "I shall be glad to make use of your kind offer."

"You will honour me," said the Frenchman.

"Um. And are you, too, interested in mining investments?"

The visitor dismissed mines and mining to his brother with a wave of his short hand. Stainton noticed that his fingers, though not long, were well shaped and tapering, in contradistinction to the spatulate thumbs, and that he wore a diamond set in a ring of thick gold.

"Those there are the avocation of my brother. I take no part in these affairs of the bourse. You will me forgive if I say, monsieur, that I have no traffic with such abominations of our society modern. I am a man of science."

"A doctor?" asked Jim.

"Of medicine."

For a moment Stainton revolved the idea of taking the visitor to see Muriel, but he divined Muriel's attitude toward such an action and banished the thought. Her indisposition was, of course, but natural and passing.

"What," asked Jim, "ought we to see first in Paris? We are strangers here, you know."

The doctor flung out his short arms. He indulged in an apostrophe to Paris that reminded Stainton of some of the orations he had read as having been delivered in the councils of the First Republic. Boussingault's English was frequently cast in a French mould and sometimes so fused that it was mere alloyage; but he never paused for a word, and he spoke with a fervour that was almost vehemence. There were moments when Jim wondered if the Frenchman suspected him of some slur on Paris and conceived it a duty to defend the city. What Jim must see was, in brief, everything.

Nevertheless, so soon as the apostrophe ended, Boussingault appeared to forget all about it. His sharp eyes travelled over the hotel sitting-room, and his mind occupied itself therewith as devotedly as it had just been giving itself to the Gallic metropolis.

"Ah, you Americans," he sighed; "how you love the luxury!"

"Perhaps we do," said Jim, recalling certain negotiations that he had conducted at the hotel's bureau; "but if the price of these rooms is a criterion, you French make us pay well for it."

Dr. Boussingault's glance journeyed to the partly open doors of the bathroom, displaying a tiled whiteness.

"And without doubt a bath?" he enquired.

"A bath," nodded Stainton.

"And me"—Boussingault shook his bullet-like head—"I well recall when the water-carts stopped at the corners of the streets too narrow for their progress, and one called from the high window that one wished to buy so much and so much, because one bathed oneself or the servant washed the linen to-day."

He talked for a while, again rhapsodically, of the old city, the city of his youth, and, when he chanced to touch upon its restaurants, Stainton asked him if, that evening or the next, he would dine with Muriel and himself.

"Ah, no," said Boussingault. "It is that madame and you, monsieur, shall dine with me. To-night? To-morrow night?"

Stainton accepted for the following evening.

"And at what spot would you prefer, monsieur?"

"I don't know," said Jim. "I have eaten sole À la Marguery. We might catch that in its native waters: we might dine at Marguery's."

"Well," the Frenchman shrugged, "Marguery is not bad. At least the kitchen is tolerable. But you should eat your sole as she swims."

They were not, however, destined to keep the appointment on the day set, for, during that morning came a petit bleu from Boussingault, postponing the dinner for a week, and followed by a letter overflowing with fine spencerian regrets to the effect that its writer had been imperatively summoned to Grenoble for consultation in an illness "occurring in a family distinguished."

"I don't care if we never see him," said Muriel. "I could hear him through the door: he talks too loud."

They consoled themselves and wearied themselves with sightseeing, and often this tried Muriel's nerves. Secretly she still watched for the appearance of signs to indicate her condition and secretly she tightened her stays, long before any signs could appear. She was often sick in the mornings, though with decreasing recurrence, and, when she began to feel relief by the diminution, she became the more despondent upon realisation of its cause. Moreover, even the comfort of petit dÉjeuner in bed did not compensate for those crumbs for which no one could be held responsible.

True to his policy to "let nature take her course," Stainton maintained a firm reticence upon the subject uppermost in the minds of both, but this reticence was applied only to his speech; and his solicitude, his patient but patent care, and his evident anxiety often annoyed her, since they kept her destiny before her and seemed to her apprehensive imagination—what they were far from being—no more than the expressions of a fear that she might make some physical revelation of her state in a public and embarrassing manner.

"You don't think of me!" she one day wept, when he had put her into a taxi-mÈtre to drive a few hundred yards.

"Muriel," said Stainton, "I think of nothing else."

"No, you don't think of me," she insisted. "You think only of—of it. You're worried about me as a mother and not as a wife. You are!"

Stainton protested, grieved to the heart; but she would not hear him.

"It's as if you were a stock-farmer," she said, the tears in her velvety eyes, "and I were only your favorite thoroughbred in foal."

This simile he found revolting. It required all his masculine philosophy satisfactorily to account for her use of it, and, even when that had been applied, he reprimanded her, with kindness, but with decisiveness also. It was some time before she begged his pardon and condemned herself; some time before he soothed her and told her, what she hated to hear, that her words had risen not from herself but from her condition.

They went to Marguery's, when the doctor returned to Paris, rather worn out by their week of sightseeing; but they found the crowded restaurant pleasantly diverting. The chatter of the diners, the scurrying of the waiters, and the gratification of the leather-covered seat from which, across a shining table, they faced Boussingault, quieted them and made them forget for a space the subject that one of them was weary of remembering.

Then, by some mischance, Stainton hit upon a fatal topic.

"Doctor," he said, "I am sure you can give me some authoritative information on a matter that I have read a little of. I mean the question of the decrease in the French birth-rate and the efforts to stop it and build up not only a larger race but a race of the best stock."

He saw instantly that he had struck the little man's hobby. Dr. Boussingault sat with one thick knee covered by his serviette and thrust into the aisle for the garÇons to stumble over. His dark eyes, keen and expressive, were shaped like wide almonds and, unobscured by any vestige of lashes, perpetually snapped and twinkled through his glasses in a lively disregard of the phlegmatic indications given by the dark bags beneath them.

"The most healthy sign in France to-day," he said. "Absolutely."

"You mean the effort to increase and better the stock?"

"No. One thousand no's. The success in decreasing it."

"My dear sir——"

The doctor waved his hands. He drank no alcohol, he said; only some wine of the country, red; but of this, heavily diluted by water, he was drinking copiously.

"Attend, monsieur. I know well, my God, these good people who go to England and have international congresses and, between the dinners given by Her Grace of Dulpuddle and the lawn parties, when one permits them to enter the park of the Castle Cad, indulge in a debauch of scientific verbosity. But yes; I know them! I have been to their meetings and heard one of these savants talk while ten snored. 'Nature, nature!' they cry, and all the time, all the time they forget Nurture. What do I to them say? I, Paul Achille Boussingault?" The doctor struck his heart, and breathed: "I say one word: 'Environment!'—and they silence themselves."

Before this volley Stainton felt dismayed.

"I had always thought," he said, "that this aim was excellent. Their purpose is the improvement of the race."

"Purpose? But yes. Good. But their Nature, she makes only effects. How do they, my God, go to attain it, their purpose? By to make more good the chance now miserable of the oppressed to bring to life some strong sons and some robust daughters? Jamais! Rather by to continue the present process of crowding to the grave the class that their class has made unfit, by to encourage breeding—million thunders, yes, among those very oppressors, truly, whose abuse of power already unfits them!"

Stainton was a trifle nervous at the fear that the talk would soon turn to subjects of which a young wife is supposed to be ignorant. He glanced at Muriel, but he saw that she was engaged solely with the cut of canard sauvage that lay on her plate, and he concluded that since she must some day learn of these things of which the doctor and he were talking, it was as well for her to learn of them from her husband and a physician. Nevertheless, he wavered.

"I thought, doctor," he said, "that in France they offered money to the poor to increase the population?"

The Frenchman's broad, pale lips smiled. He shrugged.

"Money? My friend, as a man of affairs, you must know that one cannot say 'Money' but that one is asked: ''Ow much?' Attend well: In your country and in England these savants—name of God!—want what they call the best; in my country they want what they call the many. Do they this reconcile? I should be well amused to know the way." Dr. Boussingault leaned across the table and tapped Jim's wrist with an impressive forefinger. "In all the world, all, the only people that desire the poor to produce families, they are the propriÉtaires and those lackeys of the propriÉtaires, the generals of the armies. The propriÉtaire wants much workers, and he wants workers so bound by family 'responsibilities'"—the Frenchman hissed the s's of this word—"that they dare not revolt; he wants competition for the workers, for she lowers the wage. For the generals, all they want is more men to feed to the monster, War."

"You must be a Socialist," smiled Stainton.

"Socialist?" thundered the physician. "Never in life! Me, I am I: Boussingault, mÉdecin!"

"At any rate," said Stainton, "the world can't very well get along without children, you know."

He was amazed at the doctor's manner: Boussingault would wave his arms and shout his words and then, when he had leaped to silence, relapse into a calm that seemed never to have been dispelled.

Jim regarded the neighboring tables, but no one of the company there paid any attention to the commanding tones of the physician, probably because nearly all the guests of the restaurant were engaged in talk that was quite as violent as that of Paul Achille. Muriel might have been a thousand miles away.

Now the word "children" again loosed the storm.

"Children?" shouted the doctor. "Let us be reasonable! Let us regard with equanimity the children! They ask the poor for the children, these propriÉtaires; but what they would say is servants and filles de joie to work for them. They will not pay the man sufficient to make a marriage; they pretend not to like that the women bear children without marriage—and they run about and sob for more babies! Bien. In effect, then, what is it that the labourer to them replies? He replies: 'Give me the 'abitable houses, and then I will give you in'abitants—not before.'"

Dr. Boussingault produced a huge handkerchief, shook it, mopped his sparkling brow, and resumed absolute immobility.

Stainton was now sincerely interested. He had thought somewhat upon these matters and, although he saw as yet no personal relevance in them, he had an intellectual appetite for their discussion.

"As I see it," he said, "none of these people that are trying to improve the breed denies that the poor are in a bad way, but just because the poor are in a bad way, they fail to be the stuff by which the race can be improved. I am now speaking, you understand, of what you, doctor, consider the American and English savants. What they are after is to increase the best, and their best raw material is found in the sons of the well-to-do, because the well-to-do are the intelligent, are the people that do the work of the world."

Boussingault chortled derisively.

"What propelled your ship to France?" he demanded. "An engine, is it not? But the engine, it is necessary that it be fed, and think you that the man who put the coal in that engine was well-to-do? Who grinds your corn, who makes your shoes, who builds your house? Name of God!"

"I am thinking about the directing intelligence, doctor. The improper character tossed into the human pond sinks to its bottom, and the proper character, even if placed at its bottom, rises to the top."

"So you propose to improve the race, monsieur, by breeding from the thieving millionaire risen to the top of the pond and by letting the Christs sink, as they have always sanken? Do not talk of breeding for ability until you give a chance for to develop the ability that now goes everywhere to waste. Men and women they will mate in spite of you."

"The process would strengthen marriage," said Stainton.

"But yes," replied the Frenchman. "Marriage is of relations the most intimate: they would make it the most public. It was wrong enough, my God, when, after centuries of no attention to marriage, the church quickly assumed of it the control and made of it a public ceremony. It will be more bad when the police assume of it the control and make of it a public scandal."

Muriel raised her great, dark eyes to the doctor and then lowered them to her plate.

Stainton shifted uneasily.

"I do not believe in that sort of thing and never would," he said, "but I am sure that marriage is the best friend of the race's future."

"Not so long as it is directed even as it now is. Not so long as the diseased 'usband may legally force a child on his wife, or the wife-merely-lazy may refuse to bear a child to a healthy 'usband. A wife can divorce a 'usband because he is sterile through not his own fault, but if he is sterile because he wants sterility, she must continue to be his wife. You speak well as if to make people to breed it is necessary but to go to whip them, or trick them, into a wedding. Marriage does not imply parenthood. That relationship is arbitrary."

This was something more than Jim had counted on. A slow flush mounted to his iron-grey hair. He saw that Muriel attended entirely to her food, and he did not know whether to admire this peace as evidence of her self-control or to wonder how she could hear such things and give no sign of hearing them.

The doctor, however, ran from bad to worse.

"Most of the children in this world are here by accident. They are not wanted, no, because they are too much trouble or too much cost, or they are girls, as the case may be. They are not a tie binding their parents' love by their presence; generally they are a sword to divide it by necessitating economies. What married man, even rich, does not endeavour to limit the number of his little ones, hein?" To Jim's horror the doctor broadly winked. "What unmarried man does not endeavour to suppress his little ones altogether? Both will in private joke the one to the other about it, and both fear it should publicly be known. Marriage? Poof! It is the name of a prix fixe charged for respectability."

Stainton was not the man to try to evade an issue by an attempt to divert the conversation, and he saw that the doctor was not the man to be diverted. As the waiter brought the coffee ("No cognac, thank you," said Boussingault; "no alcohol") Jim challenged direct.

"You shock me," declared the American, "by what you tell me about children not being wanted. I don't agree with you there. Of course, that is sometimes the case in irregular relations, but I think too well of humanity to believe that, by married parents of any means at all, children are not wanted after they get here."

"None?"

Both men turned: it was Muriel that had spoken. Her face grew scarlet under their look.

The doctor's glance was keen.

"I am of madame's mind," said he, quietly.

Stainton strove to pass the embarrassing interruption.

"Well, doctor," he said, and from the corner of his eye saw with satisfaction that Muriel busied herself with an intricate ice, "I stick to my belief in humanity."

Boussingault flourished his coffee cup and spilled a liberal portion of its contents.

"In what world do you live?" he asked.

"In an eminently sane one," said Stainton.

"Bien; I knew it was not the real world. In your world you know nothing, then, of all the ways, direct and indirect, to make women bear babies they do not want; in it you know nothing of the child unloved and scarcely endured; in it you know nothing of the boy or girl for these reasons, or because the mother hated the price of marriage, afflicted with morbid nerves and will-atrophy. Those who would improve the race must know of these things, but they consider them not. They consider not that there is the motherly-physical inclination combined with physical ability; that degrees of inclination and ability vary. They make one law for all that, by physique only, appear fit. Good, then: the person the best fitted for their plan is she who will not let them send her to the altar as if she had no proper will. Again, suppose you forbid the 'unfit' to marry? You straightway increase not only the number of illegitimate children, but of illegitimate unfit children, for the illegitimate child, in our mad world, has not the whole of a chance. M. Stainton, your savants would raise the race by oppressing the individuals."

Stainton's anxiety was now to end the meal. He felt that matters had gone far enough, and he feared that the topic of discussion had proved a morbid one for a prospective mother. He murmured something about the survival of the fittest.

"The survival of the fittest," roared Boussingault. "My good friend, who is it that is fitted to survive? He who can? The brute? You say"—he had quite placed poor Stainton in the opposition by this time—"you say that you would rather have for parent a robust burglar than a tubercular bishop. Me, Boussingault, I choose the bishop, for it is better to have ill health with money to hire Boussingaults than good health without money to buy food. 'Defectives'! Holy blue! The prize-fighter in New York who murders the little girl is of splendid physique and gives extraordinary care to his body. He is scrupulously clean. He does not smoke, does not even drink red wine. Of the sixteen children of his parents only seven prove, by survival, fitness to survive. He is of them—and he murders the little girl."

"Well," said Stainton, smiling, "perhaps sixteen is too many."

"Tell me why," said the Frenchman. "Our great Massenet is of a family of children"—he swung his arm and dropped his emptied cup—"countless—absolutely countless. Environment, that is what you forget; environment, and inclination and suitable physique. What to do? You should change the economic conditions that breed your 'defectives' as a refuse-heap breeds flies, but instead you propose to spend time and money to try to 'segregate' defectives as fast as you manufacture them. 'Segregate' and 'sterilize'? I have yet to hear of one of you sterilising a degenerate child of your own. You produce them not? Often. And you produce the good? Francis Galton left no child at all. I, Boussingault, say to you: breed a Florence Nightingale and an Isaac Newton and bring them up in a city slum and set them to work in a city factory, and their very good breeding will be society's loss. Truly. What you will have will not be a philanthropist and a scientist, but only a more than commonly seductive fille and a more than commonly clever thief. You cannot breed a free race until you have given to the possible mothers of it freedom of choice; and you cannot breed a healthy race until you have given to papa and mamma and baby proper food and surroundings—until you have given the man working the full pay for his toil."

He leaned back in his chair, held his handkerchief before his mouth without concealing it, and began to pick his teeth.

Muriel rose; she was pale. The two men started also to rise.

"Please don't," said Muriel. "I shall be back in a moment."

"Dearest——" began Stainton.

Muriel's answer was one look. She hurried from the room.

"My wife," said Stainton, resuming his seat, "is not very well."

"You desolate me," replied the physician as he grunted his way back into his chair. "But now that madame absents herself for a moment, let me be explicit."

"Explicit?" said Stainton. "I should have thought—Why, you have been talking as if the very construction of society were a crime!"

"Ah," said Boussingault, delightedly, "then you perceive just my point. That is it; you put it well: modern society is The Great Crime—life is The Great Sin—what we have made of Life. Disease, Ignorance, Poverty, Wage-slavery, Child-slavery, Lust-slavery, Marriage-slavery! Marriage does not produce good children more than bad. Some of the highest types of humanity have been produced by the left hand. You ignore the positive side of selective breeding. If you can decide what constitutes a 'fit' man, how can you limit his racial gifts to the child-bearing capacities of one woman? And the woman, her, too; you must provide for selective futile polygamy and polyandry. You must be presented to the unmarried mother——"

"Really——" began Stainton.

"There is something in these your theories," interposed Boussingault, rushing to his conclusion, "but here you go too far and there half-way. In Germany, until German bureaucracy captures them, they are the great aids to the revolt of Womankind, your theories. Educate for parenthood, endow mothers, pension during pregnancy and nursing—what then? Name of God! You have more to do than that, my friend—we have more to do: we have to give every child born an equal chance, every man how much he earns; we must build a society where no superstition, no economic strain, no selfish 'usband keeps childless the woman that wants to be and ought to be a mother in marriage or outside; and we must recognise of all other women their inalienable right to refuse motherhood!"

Stainton rose quickly.

"Here comes my wife," he said. "I am afraid we shall have to hurry away, doctor."